


No Sheep Here

by sidana



Series: Dimensional Warping [1]
Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 11:47:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16218395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidana/pseuds/sidana
Summary: Anita, Richard and Damien are forced out of hiding to contain a person who could unmask their secrets to the galaxy





	1. Chapter One

Author's Chapter Notes:

Disclaimer: now my characters, not my universes, I'm just playing with them for a little bit and will put them back where they belong later.

In the Babylon 5 timeline, call this set somewhere between "Ship of Tears" and "Z'ha'dum", so we're in the window of time after Bablyon 5 declared independence from Earth and before Garibaldi got kidnapped.

Originally posted to Pomme de Sang

*******

No Sheep Here

"We need to file a missing persons report."

Zack Allan looked up at the three people approaching his tiny desk. Two men and one woman. The man who had spoken was a pale redhead. The other man and the woman had dark hair and tanned skin, like they had come from a place where they could walk outside in the sun while the redhead had spent most of his time on various space stations.

"Refugee Services are located at Red 5, Office #37. Right now, they're probably your best bet for finding your friend."

"And we would have gone there if this was just a case of losing touch with him during and evacuation, that's where we would have gone. The problem is," the woman said, pausing to glance over toward the darker man. "The problem is that Chris has some problems. He's got medicine that normally takes care of those problems, but with all the shipping disruptions lately, he's gone off his meds. And when that happened, he took off on us. As far as we've been able to figure out, he came here."

"I think I know where this is going, and I'm not liking the sound of it." Zack said. "How much do I need to be worrying?"

"He is not a violent person under normal circumstances, but with him off his meds, we're concerned that he could harm himself and others," the darker man said.

"Okay, if there's a threat of violence, I can get a bulletin out on him," he said, calling up the right forms on his computer. "Your name?"

"Anita Lee."

"Where are you staying on the station?" She rattled off an address in one of the nicer parts of Red Section. From their clothes, they didn't look like they had that kind of money.

"And your friend's name?"

"Christopher Mason."

"What's he look like?"

"I've got a couple pictures of him here," she said, passing him an image cube.

"They're current?"

"In the last couple of weeks."

"Anything else we should know about him?"

"He's a lot stronger than he looks, and I wouldn't try to physically subdue him. If you find him, it really would be best if you could call myself or Richard and let one of us talk him into getting back on his meds. He'll be scared, and delusional, and we're the people who can actually get through to him, keep him from causing anyone here any damage. And he never really came out and said it, but we think," she said, pausing a moment. "We think he might be a telepath. You just never asked questions like that back home. A person's history was only what they chose to share with you and all, and he never said anything like that, but we had our suspicions."

"Great, so you're telling me that in addition to everything else I'm supposed to be dealing with, I've now got to worry about a psychotic telepath running around the station?"

"That does kind of sum it all up." Anita said. "But the good news is that he'll want to see us, and that we think we can keep him from hurting anyone else if you call us in. And if you do find him first, tell him Teresa is worried about him, and that we can take him to her."

"Okay, we'll see what we can do then. Now if you'll excuse me?"

"We'll be going then. We need to get to work on finding Christopher ourselves. We just through that the extra eyes you can give us might be helpful," the redhead said as the three left his office.

Funny how they still called it paperwork even though paper hadn't been used for a couple centuries, Zack thought as he finished filing the report. The three people had definitely not been telling him the full truth; he was sure of that. What he didn't know was whether they were the good guys or the bad guys. He wished that Dr. Franklin hadn't gone all flaky and taken off for Elvis knows where. Rumor had it that he had connections to the telepath underground. Maybe he would have heard something that would shed some light on Mason and Lee. At the same time, she might have been telling enough of the truth when she said that Mason was dangerous. He sighed and flagged the missing persons report as an intermediate priority unless they started getting reports that he was getting physical. If they tripped over Mason, they would talk to him and see if they could figure out just what the deal was, maybe even try to recruit him for the ships project if he was a telepath. If not, then he would just be one more of a hundred thousand people who had passed through the station, further destination unknown.

*******************

"I still don't like getting the cops involved." Anita said when they finally got back to their suite.

"I don't either. But we know he's bolted for here, and that we're running out of time. It's been eleven days now, and we've tracked Christopher through enough star systems we don't know what kind of lunar rhythms he'd be going on at this stage of the game. And then we get here and discover that the station's big enough and smells weird enough that it's going to take us a lot longer to find him than we thought it would." Richard said.

"Though at least there is a bright side in all of this, us being here." Damian said.

"Which would be?" Anita said.

"That we are on a space station that is overrun by alien species no one has ever seen before, and the cops are apparently too busy dealing with so many other problems that any actions Christopher takes save murder would not be noticed so much by the authorities."

"Point taken. But I just hate any plan that relies on the incompetence of others." Anita said.

"Not incompetence, but that the authorities have other priorities right now is definitely to our advantage. Think how it would be if Christopher had bolted to somewhere still controlled by EarthGov. It he had run for a place like Mars, it would have been a lot harder to get him back out of there."

"I just wish...Days like this I start to feel like I really am getting too old for all this shit. Why did Teresa have to screw up like that?" Anita said.

"Because neither love nor lust is a rational thing." Damian said, embracing her from behind and resting his chin on her shoulder. She felt her body respond to him as the worst of the tension eased away from her. "Everything we have learned says that her Christopher is here, and we will find him. Have we not always done what has needed doing?"

"We have. I'm just starting to feel tired again."

"We all are." Richard said, wrapping his arms around her as well. "So we find Christopher as quickly as possible, and then hopefully get ourselves back home as soon as possible so that Nathaniel and Jean-Claude can stop worrying about us going missing. Then maybe we can get some rest."

"But in the mean time, no rest for the wicked or weary, is there? Time for us to get to work." Anita sighed as she untangled herself from her men. "So based on the station plans we pulled up on the way out here, you were thinking he would aim for the hydroponic gardens?"

"It's probably where I'd head if I were him. That, or Brown section. It would be easier to track him though hydroponics, and God and Murphy only know we're due for a break one of these times."

*************************************

"Bester, what the hell are you doing back on my station?" Garibaldi carefully eyed the Psi Cop in front of him, a small part of him daring the other man to try to scan him so that he would see exactly what Garibaldi wished he could do to him.

"Is that any way to treat one of your allies in the war against the Shadows, Mr. Garibaldi?"

"So far, you're not in the brig, which is about as far as claiming to be an ally is going to get you. Repeating the question: why the hell are you on my station?"

"I seem to have lost another one of my people." Bester said.

"And of course, the first thing you think is that, yeah, he's going to come to Babylon 5 because that's where all your missing telepaths go, isn't it?"

"I do not understand the charms of this place, and certainly not the charms of its personnel, but for whatever reason, it does seem to have a certain appeal to the blips." Bester said.

"And you think that, yeah, we'll help you find your missing person because we've always been so helpful about turning over rogue telepaths to the Corps before?"

"I think you will help me on this one." Bester said, pulling a data cube out of his pocket. "It's all images on this. Don't worry, no words on it because having to read would probably only confuse you."

"Keep flattering me like this, and of course I'll fall for your charms." Garibaldi said as he extended his hand out for the data cube, careful to not touch Bester's gloved hand. "So what do we have here?"

"Watch and see."

Garibaldi inserted the data cube, and began to play the vids it contained. They involved a man, tall with wavy shoulder length blonde hair and green eyes. He didn't wear a Psi-Corps badge, but he did wear gloves. He jogged along a sunny street on some colony world, wrapping his arms around his stomach as if he were in pain. He shook his head, then bolted from the street into a nearby alley.

When the camera picked him up again, he was standing doubled over in the alley, looking like he had just finished vomiting. Then his head snapped up as he seemed to hear another approach. He tried to move further down the alley, but quickly reached the wall marking the end of the narrow road. Uniformed colony police officers started to move closer to the man, firing their PPGs at him. To Garibaldi's surprise, the man took a half dozen hits from the weapons, but kept moving forward.

The man then began to hit back at the security men, tossing them up against walls like they were dolls even as they kept firing ineffectively against him. Heads bounced against walls and roadway until all the men were unconscious or dead. The blonde stood over one of them, tracing his fingertips across the man's chest. He then dug his nails into the man's uniform with such force that the fabric looked like it was covered in claw marks. The blonde looked down at the man, hand still full of fabric even as it reached for now the now exposed chest. Then a look of horror crossed the blonde's face and he bolted from the alley.

"Don't tell me, another one of your Psi-Corp experiments has gone wrong, and now you expect us to pick up the pieces." Garibaldi said.

"This was not our doing. His name is Christopher Mason, and he is loyal to the Corps. He is a Psi Cop, a P-12. Fourteen days ago, he was working to track down a blip that had caught our attention. That was the last time he was in contact with the Corps. The vids you just saw were from seven days ago on Calestina 3." Bester said. "I know Christopher well, and consider him to be a friend. These are not the actions that he would have taken unless he was under the influence of some other entity."

"So what am I supposed to do about it?" He said, biting back a remark about how he was surprised that someone like Bester would actually have friends.

"Help me find him, if only for the safety of your own people." Bester said. "Indications are that after he left Calestina, he headed here."

"So he is facing criminal charges back on Calestina?" Garibaldi said with a sigh. He hated helping Bester just on general principle but he hated the idea of what had happened on Calestina happening to his men as well.

"Many counts, I am certain."

"Then I can issue a warrant for his arrest." Garibaldi said. "Though I'm not happy about sending my people after someone who doesn't go down from a PPG blast like they should."

"I can accompany your people as they search for him, and then control Christopher when he is found so he can be brought back to justice."

"But only after we get his side of the story," he said, plugging the warrant information into the computer. "I still don't trust you're telling me the full truth here, and a-ha!"

"A-ha?"

"Someone else is already looking for your Christopher Mason. An Anita Lee arrived on the station yesterday and filed a missing persons report on him. Described him as dangerous and mentally unstable when off his medication. Also described him as possibly being a telepath. Don't suppose you know the lady?"

"I don't know the name."

"Not that it would mean anything. You people have enough layers of conspiracies that your head doesn't know what your head is doing."

"Must everything be so crude with you, Mr. Garibaldi?"

"It's my special gift to the universe."


	2. Chapter 2

Richard inhaled, taking the scents of the farms that made up the center of the station into his lungs. There were peach and nectarines to the left of him, and pecan trees over to his right. The dirt under his feet held potatoes and onions. He had spent too much time lately rushing from system to system putting out one fire after another and never finding a place to stretch out and run like he yearned to. Babylon 5 wasn't a proper terraformed colony world, but it was so much more than he had been getting lately. He had even gotten a brief smell of what seemed like rabbit somewhere in the direction of Grey section.

"Richard?" Damian said.

"Yeah, I know what I'm here to do. But you remember the old saying about all work and no play making me a grumpy wolf."

"You're always grumpy whether you're working or playing." Anita said.

"Like you can talk, Miss Mary Sunshine," he said softly. "But I know, the sooner we find Chris, the sooner everyone can stop worrying quite so much."

He pulled the carefully sealed bag out of his coat pocket, wishing that he could just do all of this as a wolf because his sense of smell was so much more accurate in that form. But there were no dogs on the station from what he had seen, and a wolf appearing suddenly on the security camera screens could draw too much of the wrong kind of attention. As long as he stayed in human form, the eyes in the sky wouldn't see them as anything unusual, and Damian could still roll the minds of almost anyone they just happened to physically cross paths with that might notice they didn't really belong in the farms.

"Let the record show that I feel like a pervert doing this," he said, pulling Chris Mason's underwear out of the bag and bringing it close to his nose.

"It's noted on the record." Anita said. "But we do the best we can with the tools we have."

"I know, but merde, one of these days we need to get some better tools." The words were familiar and comforting, almost a ritual of sorts after all those years. He closed his eyes, ignoring all the rest of his senses to focus on his sense of smell. There were a half dozen different scents on the briefs; he started by separating out the ones from cleaners and contact with other fabrics, then pushed away Teresa's smell from the garment before he zeroed in on Mason's core scent, the one he could not change no matter what he did. According to Teresa, Mason had grown up on a mining colony. It was probably why he smelled like moss with a metallic undertone. He was also smelling decidedly more wolfy than he had on Calestina. Hopefully they were going to get to him before he did something he really regretted. "Okay, I know what I'm looking for."

"Good. So it's time to walk all the gardens here in a grid pattern like Damian mapped out."

They set out through the gardens, making their way through fruit orchards and neatly-tended blackberry bushes. They briefly had to back track through a grain area that had been labeled wheat but turned out to be rice paddy, but other than that, they managed to cover the pattern mostly as they had planned. They had to pause briefly in a citrus area after they crossed paths with farm workers. As Damian quietly informed the workers that the three of them were not to be noticed, Richard's thoughts briefly flashed back to an ancient movie, and he fought back the urge to tell the workers that these were not the droids they were looking for. Anita would have gotten the joke at least, and she hadn't had nearly enough chances to laugh in the last twenty years.

"Stop," he told the others just as they came to the edge of a huge recreation area, the scent of carefully-tended turf grass ticking at his nose.

"What is it? Do we need to evade football practice now?" Damian said.

"No, I think I've almost got something." He moved around the third base side of the baseball field, walking through the dugout. There, in between sweat and bats and spit and drips of hydration drink, was the scent he was looking for. "Mason came through here."

"Are you just picking up one spot, or is there a trail?"

"A trail, I'm thinking," he said as he followed the scent from dugout to behind the backstop, then toward locker rooms in between fields. At the locker rooms, the trail seemed to split into two parts. "The problem is figuring out which way to go to get closer to where he is instead of further back away to where he used to be."

"What are the two directions?" Damian said.

"First way is toward the pepper bushes," he said, waving his hand to the right. "Second way goes across the soccer fields."

"Pepper plants." Anita said. "There's a shuttle stop just on the other side of the soccer fields. We've got every reason to assume he's going to be running away from people right now, not going back toward them."

"Peppers it is, then."

They followed the trail relatively easily from that point, criss-crossing their way through plants from both Earth and any number of different alien worlds. A little part of him wished that they would have some time after they found Mason to try some of the different produce. There was something that looked like a baby blue squash that smelled particularly wonderful. There was no real pattern to Mason's path, and Richard could pick up a hint of fear smell on the trail. He hoped that Mason could keep his panic in check long enough for Richard to have The Talk with him.

They moved through an aquaculture area, and Richard briefly lost the trail before finding it again on the other side of the water. Then a hundred yards past the water, they found Christopher Mason.

"Christopher? Chris? Is that you in there?" Richard said as he approached the door to a small but sturdily built storage building, his hands down at his sides. Damian followed closely behind him. He hoped that the two of them were enough to get Mason under control if they had to. They knew that the vampires could block a P-10 from controlling or shredding someone else's mind, and that he shared Jean-Claude's resistance to psi tricks because of the marks, but so far they had been lucky enough to not have to pit a vampire against a Psi-Cop.

"Go away." A male voice said as Richard opened the door.

"We can't do that." Richard said, walking into the building. He found Mason huddled on the flood wedged between what his nose said was fertilizer barrels. His pale hair was knotted, he smelled like he hadn't bathed for a week, and his eyes were on the verge of slipping their human facade.

"You have to. I don't want to hurt you, so go away now." Richard could feel the telepath's power as he mentally lashed out at them. Even now, Mason was managing to hold onto a shred of control- for all that it would have been easier for him to kill them, he had reined it in enough to only thrall a normal human. It was the first good sign that had gotten in days.

"We're friends of Teresa," Richard said. She was the key to reaching Mason, he thought as he carefully knelt down next to the other man. "After what happened, she called us, and we came to find you. We're here to help you, to teach you how to control the new part of you, the beast that's now inside of you. Teresa loves you, and she wanted us to make sure nothing more happened to you."

"If she loved me, she wouldn't have done this to me," Mason said, trying his best not to scream. "Now even my own people would think I was a freak that needed to be destroyed. I can barely stop myself from scanning their minds even when I have no reason to just because I'm hoping to find someone who is afraid. And then when I find that, it's like I want to find a way to keep them scared because I can almost taste their fear in my mouth."

"It's not always like that." Richard said, running his fingertips across Mason's cheek. "It doesn't have to be."

"Don't touch. Not supposed to touch me." Mason said, trying to pull away from him. "Can't block you out when you do."

"You don't have to, not with me." Richard said, his hand going back to Mason's face and then down his neck. Between Jean-Claude's gift and Anita outside channeling Damian's calm into him through the marks, the necessary contact between the two of them should be as tolerable for a telepath as anyone could make it. "See, it's not so bad, is it? I can keep you from going into my mind so you can just focus on the physical. And you need that physical contact with your own kind now. It helps you get yourself under control so you can live with yourself."

"My kind? I had people who were my kind, and what she did rips them all away from me. I can't go back to them like this, and there's no place else I can go." Wanting to comfort the other man, Richard wrapped his arms around him, one hand running through the other man's hair.

"You can come back with us. We have a place for you."

"But you don't understand." Mason said, pulling away from Richard for a moment before instinct took over and he leaned back into the embrace. "I can't go back to them, but I can't run from them either. The only way you stop being a Psi-Cop is by being dead. It's not like being a P-5 where they go and hand you a bottle of pills, or give you a shot, and that's enough."

"It's easy enough to make them think you're dead," Damian said. "We've got several hundred year's worth of practice in that area."

"Security sweep." Anita said as she ducked into the building. "Had their back to me, so I saw them before they saw me."

"So we give them a couple of minutes, and then head back toward the recreation area. Say we got lost looking for the tennis courts if we run into anyone."

"And I trust you're coming with us, Chris," Richard said, letting his own beast brush up against Christopher's just enough so that the other man could feel it. He would always hate having to play the dominance card, but right now Christopher needed to feel that from him, the threat and promise of pack rolled up into one.

"At least you'd probably have a better hiding place than this."

"Definitely. Boss lady even sprang for the room with a real water shower." Damian said, a faint hint of a smile on his face as he teased Anita.

"Let's get out of here then." He half dragged Mason from the floor into a standing position. They moved past the barrels, Richard finessing his mental shields and control over his beast so he could help Mason keep his own in check.

As they walked out of the building, they ran almost smack into Anita's security patrol.

"I think we're lost. Made a wrong turn at the soccer fields," Anita said as the men eyed the guards. Great. There was one Psi-Cop uniform mixed in with the station security ones.

"Christopher?"

"Al?"

Richard could smell Mason's sudden panic at the sight of the other telepath, could feel the new beast rising up inside of him. He reached out with the magic that made him alpha, a wave of power slamming into the other man in an attempt to keep him from shifting in front of witnesses. To his surprise, Mason went twisting out of his grip, grabbing him by the shoulders and pushing him toward the outbuilding with strength he didn't know he had yet. Then Richard's head crashed into the hard wall, and everything went black.


	3. Chapter 3

Michael Garibaldi was not a happy camper. He had never trusted Bester, and certainly was not about to let him roam around in the station unsupervised these days. So he had appointed himself Bester's escort as they searched for Christopher Mason, and dragged Zack and Correy along with him as back-up. Three against one when Bester was involved had sounded about right, and his staff was involved with so many other station activities that he couldn't pull many more of them away from that for the search. But now four against Mason was starting to seem like it wasn't enough, especially after he witnessed how Mason had nearly put another man through a concrete wall. Mason had stumbled about fifty feet away from the storage building, and now warily watched as a tiny, dark-haired woman carefully walked toward him, her hands clear of her sides.

"Christopher, you don't have to run. You don't have to go with those people. We'll protect you from them," she said

"She's the one who said she was Anita Lee." Zack quielty said. "Does she look familiar to anyone?"

"I've never seen her before in my life," Bester said. "But let her try to talk to him for a moment. I can't reach him right now. His mind, I don't understand what is happening in his mind, but she seems like she might reach him."

"I'm calling Medlab. Guy probably got hurt going into that wall." Correy said, nodding toward the dark man crumpled against the building, a red-haired man leaning over to examine him.

"You can't do that for me." Mason said. "If I've hurt enough people that they've sent Al after me, then there's no hope left for me."

"You'd be surprised at what we can do. Teresa had one role when it came to protecting our people. My role and resources go way beyond that. Come back with us, and everyone will be safe. You'll be safe, Teresa will be safe, and the people around you will be safe."

"I want to, but I can't. Al's here for me. He'll want to take me apart and figure out what made me go crazy. The security guys with the PPGs drawn, I can feel how they want to kill me even as I can taste their fear. And how that makes me feel and what that makes me want to do."

"Christopher, it gets better. We helped Teresa get through those early hard months, and we can help you."

"Teresa, no I can't let Al get to Teresa." Mason said, his voice getting close to hysteria. Faster than what Garibaldi would have thought was humanly possible, he spun around and bolted further into the farmland. Garibaldi and his people started to chase him, but by the time they reached where Anita Lee stood, Mason had vanished from their sight.

"Peachy, just peachy," Anita said. "Just when we almost got him controlled, you lot had to come along and do something to make him want to pull a runner again."

"I don't understand." Bester said.

"I don't either, but you, Al or whatever your name is, you need to hope we can find Christopher again before he ends up killing someone, and considering the emotional state he's in right now, that's a real possibility. I need to check on Richard now. He never would have gotten hurt if you people hadn't shown up," she said, changing the subject as she stormed back toward the storage building. Garibaldi found himself following in her wake as he hit his link to put out an APB on Mason. He let her reach Richard and the red-haired man and briefly examine Richard before he began to talk to her again.

"How is he?" he said.

"Medlab has a team on the way," Correy said.

"Don't worry. He'll heal. He always does. He won't even need a trip to the hospital," Anita said.

"Good. Then you'll have the time to answer a few questions like who you really are, why you were looking for Christopher Mason, and why I have an apparently insane Psi Cop on my station." He was surprised at how little worry she showed toward her friend, whose head had hit the side of the building pretty hard.

"I'm Anita Lee, the redhead's Damian Michaelson, and the guy who will be struggling up to consciousness shortly is Richard Van Zie. Christopher is a friend of a friend."

"The Teresa you kept telling him about?" Garibaldi said, drawing a look from Bester. "Hey, believe it or not, I do have a brain here."

"Yes, that would be Teresa. Teresa's got some health problems." Anita said, seeming like she was picking her words very carefully. "She's got a chronic viral infection. It's generally pretty hard to spread, but can be passed along, and there's no delicate way of putting it, sexually, which seems to have happened here."

"And this virus, what does it do?" Bester said.

"Interesting things to your endocrine system, including massive sudden surges in adrenaline in the body, sudden changes in temperament and mood, and paranoia. All of which are now happening to Christopher since Teresa made a mistake and decided to have sex with him."

"But there's more to it than what you're telling me," Bester said as he walked closer to Anita. "I saw into his mind, and don't know what it was I saw, but it was more than just that."

"Bester, I'm not going to let you," Garibaldi started, but before he could finish Anita reached toward the telepath, grabbed him by the throat with one hand, and spun him so his back was shoved against the wall. As she moved, her free hand reached into her jacket and she pulled an ancient Browning pistol from a hidden holster.

"No one reads my mind, not ever," she said as she shoved the gun against Bester's cheek. "I don't know who you think you are that you can try, but I'm not going to let that happen."

"Ms. Lee," Garibaldi said as he and Zack drew PPGs. "Look, I know Bester well enough to understand the impulse, but I can't let you kill the guy on my watch on my station. Unfortunately, we kind of need his help in other ways right now, so you need to let him live."

"He tried to roll me. No one gets to play mind games with me like that. I've got too many people relying on me to keep them safe for me to let him trap through my brain like it was a field of daisies."

"Daisies?" Zack said.

"Anita," Damian said as he looked up from his spot next to Richard.

"He's still trying to crack me here, even when he's got a gun in his face. Can't you feel him?"

"Yes, I can feel him, but if you shoot him, then Mister Allan and his friends will probably shoot you, and us all ending up dead still leaves Christopher running free on the station, which is the thing we came here to prevent."

"And if Bester tries to scan you again, I can have him thrown back in his old cell in the brig. We do have rules against unauthorized scans here, and he knows that he can't expect to hide behind the EarthGov shield right now like he has in the past," Garibaldi said, doing his best to persuade the possibly crazy lady to stop pointing her gun at Bester's face.

"Okay." Anita said. She pulled the gun away from Bester, and put it and her right arm straight up in the air. Using her left arm, she pushed Bester into the wall. He slumped to the ground as she took steps away from him.

"You brought an unauthorized weapon onto Babylon 5, Ms. Lee. I need to confiscate that." Garibaldi said as he walked up behind her and put his hand on her gun hand.

"I figured you'd want to do that." Anita said.

"And do I need to mention how much of a bad idea it is to bring that kind of projectile weapon onto a space station? Fire it, and you could cause an air leak that leads to serious depressurization," he said as he took the gun from her.

"Believe what you will, I've been doing this long enough to be smart about it. The ammunition in the gun was designed way back in its day to be used by air marshals. It massively fragments upon impact. It could be safely used in a 727, and a space station is about 50 times better armored against depressurization than those old planes were. Worst case scenario, that ammo's also about the only thing anyone has that can bring down Christopher without your people getting cut up in the process. So don't go sending the gun off to wherever it is you people put contraband just yet." She stuck both arms out far from her sides as if she expected him to frisk her for more weapons.

"Carrying anything else?" Garibaldi asked as he passed the gun back to Zack. He patted down her sides and back.

"Believe it or not, that's it today. Makes me feel almost naked compared to what I carry back home."

"Who and what are you?" Bester said. "I could tell you're not a telepath, but you can still block my scans. There are fingerprints in your room that are a match for an Anita Graison, who briefly lived Mars a hundred years ago. And a normal human would not be strong enough to lift me off my feet with one arm like you just did."

"You know the creatures in your nightmares? The one from the old stories and sagas that everyone these days knows are only myth and legend because the world would be a bloodbath if they were real?" Damian said. "Anita is the person who is their boogeyman, the one who keeps humanity safe because they're scared to cross her."

"And you are?" Garibaldi said.

"The one who cleans up after Anita's finished. It's my lot in life, and I've accepted it. Richard's waking up now," the man said, abruptly changing the subject as Richard began to groan his way to consciousness.

"Chief?" Zack said.

"I think I've been hanging around the Minbari too much because that almost made sense to me."

"Can I propose an understanding then? You'll want to get Christopher Mason off Babylon 5. We'll help you do that, and in exchange, you drop any plans to hold us involving trespassing, and weapons violations."

"Garibaldi, you can't take them up on that. Mason is one of mine. He goes back with me."

"You're forgetting, Bester. We're not under EarthGov rules right now. I think I'll have to take them up on their offer." He could justify the decision by claiming that Lee and her friends were withholding information on Mason, and working with them would help them find Mason quicker than starting a confrontation. That he enjoyed seeing someone manhandle Bester didn't play into his decision at all, and neither did the chance to deny Bester a prize he seemed to want very badly. No, that didn't play into his decision at all.


	4. Chapter 4

"Can I have a look at Richard?" Anita asked as she carefully eyed Garibaldi and his men.

"Sure, go ahead." As Anita bent down to examine her friend, Garibaldi took the time to examine the Browning in his hand. It was an old weapon, but very carefully maintained. And although she might seem crazy, Anita had never been careless enough to mess with the safety of the gun while she had it at Bester's head. He found himself almost wanting to smile as the smell of gun oil brought back happy memories of his grandmother.

He watched as Damian rose, and she carefully straddled Richard, cradling his face in her hands. She closed her eyes, kissing him gently on the lips.

"We've got a rogue Psi-Cop on the loose, and she goes and takes time for smoochies?" Zack said.

"It's necessary," Damian said, but offered no further explanation.

"Necessary?" Bester said.

"Call it another question that you are just never going to get the answer to," Anita said as she got up, then pulled Richard to his feet. He looked alert and ready for action, not like someone who had at least a concussion and probably a skull fracture from having his head slammed into the wall.

"So what did I miss?" Richard said.

"Fortunately, Christopher went for flight instead of fight, and then our friendly neighborhood telepath there tried to roll me. He won't be trying that again." Anita said as anger briefly flashed across Richard's face. "Chief Garibaldi made nice and promised that wouldn't happen again, and now we're all set for you to find Christopher."

"The Psi-Cop isn't coming with us. He can't be." Richard said.

"Unfortunately, he is," Garibaldi said. "There isn't a better place for him to go on the station, and if our friend Mason decides to cause trouble, my people don't have the same sort of protection from him that you do. If he decides he wants to try to shred my men's minds, then Bester is the one who will keep that from happening. Isn't that right?"

"I suppose that is the only way I will be allowed to remain free and see Chris?" Bester said.

"Gosh, maybe you are a little bit smarter than I give you credit for, working it out like that," Garibaldi said.

"So now how are we supposed to find Mason," Zack said. "And how are we supposed to catch up with him? I couldn't believe how fast he was running away from here."

"That's actually a good sign. The young ones, they don't realize that that kind of speed makes you burn through a lot of energy pretty quickly. He'll have crashed a lot sooner than he would have if he'd held a slower pace," Richard said. He closed his eyes, and drew a deep breath in through his nose. "He went this way."

Richard began to walk towards the direction Mason had fled. As far as Garibaldi knew, he had been unconscious while Mason had been running, and Bester would have mentioned it if Richard was a telepath, so how did he know how to follow Mason? With the way his nose flared, it was almost like Richard was tracking Mason by smell.

"I don't know how much Anita said to you, but I'm going to ask you to take a leap of faith and trust us when it comes to dealing with Chris," Richard said as he began to walk into a corn field, the rest of the group following behind him. "Right now, I'm one of three people in known and unknown human territory who might be strong enough to keep it so no one else gets hurt."

 

"And the other two?" Bester said.

"No where your people could ever get to them," Damian said firmly.

"So if I say to do something or not do something, please follow that instruction. Because there may not be time for me to ask it again."

"This virus is that dangerous? I'm going to have to talk to Medlab about setting up a quarantine area then." Garibaldi said.

"As I said before, it takes sex or some other sort of close physical contact for it to spread, and the virus dies quickly once it's outside of its host," Anita said. "Hopefully you're all going to be sensible enough to stay far enough back from Mason that the close physical contact doesn't become an issue."

Even though they were mostly quiet from that point on as they followed Richard, Damien still grumbled a few times about how Garibaldi and his men were tromping through the grain fields loudly enough that there was no way that you could properly track anything. Just as Garibaldi started to snap back at the other man, Bester suddenly stopped and looked toward Richard.

"I can feel him even though he's trying to shield from me."

"Shuttle station just ahead," Richard confirmed.

Richard took off running, using the same inhuman speed that Mason had shown earlier. Garibaldi waved to his people to follow them. He churned over his legs until he was at a full sprint in order not to lose track of Richard, a part of him noticing that Anita didn't seem to have to be working particularly hard to keep up with him. He saw a man who looked like Mason bolt from the protection of the station shelter, moving at an impossibly quick clip. But Richard was even quicker, lunging with expert ease and talking Mason to the ground.

"Stop." Anita ordered as she suddenly slowed her own pace. "Those two need to work out some issues here. We need to give them some space."

"Richard, he's infected with your virus too?" Garibaldi said.

"For a very long time," she said. "He knows how to control the urges, and one of his duties is to teach others their own control. Bester, I know your kind can't miss a chance to put a hand in the cookie jar, but if you try to get into his mind right now, you'll spook him again when that's the last thing we want to happen."

"Funny how it looks like a bar fight to me," Zack said as Mason twisted around in an attempt to get away from Richard. For a split second, Mason got a glimpse of Bester, and his eyes seem to change color from green to yellow and a beard seemed to spontaneously sprout along his face and neck.

"Control," Richard said, regaining his grip on Mason and pushing him face first into the ground. "If we don't have that, then we're nothing."

Garibaldi began to inch closer toward the two men, but was stopped by Anita's hand on his arm.

"No closer. Christopher needs to accept that there's someone who can control him when he can't control himself if he's going to survive this."

"And if he gets away from Richard?"

"Then you're the one who can do what needs to be done," she said with a hint of genuine sadness in her voice. He was the one with the gun that could supposedly hurt Mason when PPGs could not.

The two men spent another minute wrestling before Richard finally got the angle the he wanted, twisting Mason's arm behind his back until he came close to dislocating Mason's shoulder. Richard pulled him back up into a sitting position, then Garibaldi watched with fascination as Mason closed his eyes and tilted his head to one side until his ear was almost touching his shoulder. Richard leaned forward, bringing his mouth up to Mason's neck and delivering a quick bite to his throat.

"What the?" Zack said as Richard let go of Mason's arm so he could pull his shirt up and rub his hand against Mason's bare back.

"Control," Richard repeated as he pulled himself around so he sat next to Mason, his body pressed close against the other man's. "I know you can do it. You understand the kind of discipline you need if you're going to survive it. See you're doing well already." Richard kept talking in the same soothing tone for several more minutes, all the while rubbing the other man on the back and side.

"Terri?" Mason finally said, his voice hoarse and strained.

"She's waiting for you back home," Richard said.

"Home. So I finally get to see where she was hiding. Is she okay?"

"She will be."

"I didn't hurt her, did I?" Mason said.

"No you didn't. But she broke the first rule, and she has to take responsibility for her actions," Richard said.

"Let me guess, the first rule is to not fall in love with the wrong person," Garibaldi said.

"We could never ask that of our people," Anita said, her voice surprisingly gentle. "Love, if you knew you many times love was all we have left standing between ourselves and utter darkness, destruction and despair; you'd understand that we would never do anything to interfere with love from one of our own."

"So what is the first rule then?"

"Don't draw the wrong attention to yourself or the community," Damian said. "Though in Teresa's case, part of her job was to draw attention to herself and lure those who would hunt us away from the community. She's one of the best decoys we've ever had, even if Psi-Corps would have thought of her as only a mere P-6. One day the Psi-Corps needs to learn that talents go far beyond that number."

"And she should have known better," Anita said as she kept a careful eye on Richard and Mason. "If she was really falling in love with the man who was supposed to be following her, then there are ways we could have brought them together in time. So Teresa vanishes from Christopher's life, and then a few weeks or few months later, he gets a message that if he loves her and wants to permanently be with her, then he needs to meet with our people at a specific date and place and he will be taken toward her. We've gotten good at making people disappear over the years. Even your own people, Mr. Bester would have thought Christopher was dead and never tried to track him after that.

But instead, she got far too close to him too soon and decided to have sex with him. As I'm told happens, all the mental shielding between the two of them went crashing down, and Christopher saw what she really was. She panicked, and changed on him, and ended up infecting him with the virus she carries even as he was doing his best to run from her bedroom. She told us what happened, and we've been chasing Christopher ever since."

"Is he stable enough for us to move him?" Damian asked.

"I think so," Richard said. "Are you ready to get away from here? Because as nice as this place is, it's still no substitute for a real forest with the moon fat over your head."

"I'm ready," Mason said. Richard carefully helped him to his feet, his arms staying wrapped around the other man at all times.

"Damian?" Anita said.

"Yes. Mr. Bester?" the redhead said as he looked the other man squarely in the eyes.

"So are you going to explain what happened now?"

"Christopher Mason is dead. He died on Babylon 5 and you saw the body. However, he died of an unknown pathogen, so the medical personnel refused to release the body into your care. Now go back to where you came."

To Garibaldi's surprise, Bester nodded, and began to walk away from the group.

"I'll be going back to my ship now," he said, heading toward the shuttle stop.

"Zack, Correy, escort Mr. Bester back to his ship."

"Got it, Chief," Zack said as they began to follow Bester through the garden.

"Did you just do something to Bester's mind there?" Garibaldi asked

"In a way, yes." Damian said. "I hope you will not wish to put me in the brig for it, but it would be too dangerous for him to keep searching for a live Christopher Mason."

"How did you? He would have said something if you were a rogue telepath."

"I'm not a telepath, but something else entirely. But I can cloud the minds of others, even for telepaths for a few times before their minds start to figure out how to defeat that clouding. With a Psi-Cop, I was not sure how long that would take, so I assumed I would have only one chance to influence him."

"And that's why you didn't try something earlier with Mason?"

"That, and Christopher is Richard's kind not mine."

"Are you going to put the whammy on me and my men too?" he said, wondering if he could be quick enough with Anita's gun if he had to.

"Do you think we need to?" Anita said, "I know Babylon 5's live and let live reputation, and that you also don't have the resources right now to search for us out there when so much trouble keeps showing up at your own doorstep."

"Besides, who would believe me anyways if I started trying to claim that werewolves were real."

Anita's face went blank as he said that, her eyes going almost dead in their sockets.

"I guessed right then?"

"How did you know?" Richard said.

"It looked like the bullets in Anita's gun had silver in them. That, and Christopher's eyes and face getting almost wolf-like there. Believe it or not, the idea that werewolves exist doesn't even crack the top ten in terms of weird things I've seen here. And Anita's information was right. As long as you stay off my station from here on out, I'll gladly go on pretending that you don't exist. Unless your people want to sign up to fight against the Shadows. We could probably use the skills your people would bring."

"It's not our fight this time," Anita said. "We just can't get involved in that kind of struggle."

"The way the war is going, it's going to be everyone's fight sooner or later."

"Then it will be later with us. It's not that we're scared of fighting. Some of the hotheads in the community would love the chance. It's not that we're scared of death. When we fought the Mother, there were nearly two thousand of us, and only a hundred and eighty seven of us walked back out again. It's just that there's a power that gets raised when so many of us come together that even we don't understand. When we defeated the Mother, everything around us suddenly changed. Our metaphysicists can't figure out if we got ourselves sent to some sort of alternate or parallel universe during the fight or if our actions somehow altered the fabric of reality. And until we figure out just what happened, we don't want to risk ripping reality again. I wish we could do more, but we just don't dare."

"It's time to go now." Richard said.

"I think I'll need to escort you back to your ship."

The four of them didn't raise a fuss about that, but they didn't answer any more of Garibaldi's questions either. In the end, he got called away on another security emergency moments after they went through their airlock, and was left with even more questions than he had answers, and a desire to try to find them again someday if the war ever came to an end.


End file.
